Szymon Datner

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Szymon Datner (1902–1989) was a Polish historian of Jewish descent.

Before the World War II he worked as a teacher in a Jewish Hebrew gymnasium in Białystok. He survived the war in the forests of eastern Poland, fighting in several partisan groups. He also helped in smuggling several people out of the Białystok Ghetto on May 24, 1943. Between 1944 and 1946 he was head of the Białystok branch of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. Afterwards he headed the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw and was one of the historians of the Commission to Investigate the Nazi Crimes, now part of the Institute of National Remembrance. One of the most prominent specialists in German World War II war crimes and the Holocaust, he was dismissed in the effect of the March 1968 events, he was rehabilitated soon afterwards. He died in 1989 in Warsaw and is buried at the local Jewish cemetery. His daughter, Helena Datner-Śpiewak, is also a notable Polish-Jewish historian and sociologist.